


February

by orphan_account



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Modern AU, NaruSaku - Freeform, but sad, crossposted from ffn, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-10 23:57:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20536784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: She loved her namesake flowers. She collected them from the tree she grew in her backyard. She sometimes slept under it—she tied a mosquito net in its various branches, lay on a thick blanket, watched the flowers and counted the stars.





	February

**Author's Note:**

> This story is an AU—it holds references to both Naruto (by Kishimoto Masashi) and a Bollywood film, October (by Juhi Chaturvedi).

——

It’s a chilly spring morning, and Sakura sets out by dawn—the sun is still groggy, the dew still beads each blade of grass and the mist is still coolly palpable.

She collects her favorite flowers—from the fallen, of course, she wouldn’t dare pluck them—and places them in a small glass bowl, one by one, with the gentle, cautious fingers of the surgeon she is.

A basic morning routine that she practices religiously, before she goes to work in the hospital her mother runs.

——

That night, her friends—who work in the five-star hotel that’s across the road—throw a party. Ino had stolen a few drinks from the ongoing banquet (when Sakura admonishes her, she responds with a “Live a little.”), and a few other friends join them at the terrace of Kiba’s small flat. They all chatter, eat and drink.

Sakura refrains from the alcohol, and munches on a few of the finger-foods. She asks, “Where’s Naruto?” 

Ino hums before replying, “I dunno, he was bunking his shifts as usual, so we left him.”

Sakura perches upon the thick slab railings.

It, as mentioned, was a misty morning; the slab was damp.

It happens so fast and so noiselessly no one notices until Sai turns around to tease her about her love life (or lack thereof), and sees nobody. He shouts, and everyone rushes over.

They all crowd at the corner, and watch her, three floors down, sprawled, blood oozing out of her head, body flattened by the fall. They call an ambulance, and call her mother, Tsunade.

They watch her, teary-eyed, as the ambulance buckles her limp body to a cot, and carries her to the emergency ward of the very hospital she works in, the very hospital her mother runs.

——

Tsunade is restricted from operating from her daughter, since the last incident of her husband. She had to perform a surgery, but her hands shook so much—so much—that he died to her own hands—her own renowned hands, that are capable of saving billions, that are insured for billions, and people travel billions of miles for.

Tsunade doesn’t fight back, contrary to her usual reputation of snapping and shoving aside her own staff, to prove the capable woman she is. She knows she’s as useless as an intern when it comes to her family.

_ The translation? _ —The elder woman thinks, bitterly;  _ I’m useless when I’m needed most. _

——

Her hair—the lustrous, locks of pale rosy hair—are shaved off, and her head is constantly scanned, operated and studied. One eye is swollen, and the bones around it are shattered. Her lips are chapped and coated in blood. Several pipes run to-and-fro her body, nutrients are water are constantly dripping into her now-frail system.

Her family visits daily—her younger brother, Sasuke, her elder sister, Shizune, and her mother. Her friends come just as much, squeezing time between their hotel shifts, and watch her.

A week passes, and her absence is quite noticeable. Ino sometimes, when she hears something she likes, (and knows Sakura would to), turns to squeal and tell her—yet finds no-one to talk to.

Naruto, when he bunks his shifts, walks to the place where he knows she will be for her afternoon snack—at the small sweet stand next to her hospital, and waits for her to chide him, send him back to the hotel or even spank him upside the head. But he gets no reprimand.

Sai passes blunt comments that are socially unacceptable, and awaits a scathing comment from his green-eyed friend, but receives silence.

Her brother, Sasuke, wants to enter his room and be drowned in a bucket of water. He wants to see her playing games on  _ his _ computer. He wants to wake up and see her using the shower for hours at a time, leaving him with freezing water and little to no shampoo. He wants to call her “Annoying,” and wants to her reply “Insufferable.”

Kakashi, her old teacher and uncle, wants her to come and challenge him to a quiz, tease him about his stupid mask, steal his eighteen-plus novels, and even gang up on him with her brother and Naruto. He wants to (once a teacher, always a teacher) correct her English (“It’s Ino and I, Sakura.”) and learn from her as well.

Shizune wants to give Sakura her hand-me-downs, talk about the problems one faces with a brother, quarrel about ‘who’s the better doctor’ and complain about men who called them ‘nurses’ instead of ‘doctors’ at work.

Her mother wants to talk to her and Shizune about taking over the business, the puzzling surgery cases she receives, and wants to dance around the kitchen with her and Shizune.

——

Naruto visits her more than anyone. (Since the rest don’t bunk their jobs.) He bunks his shifts and comes, watching her weak body, and imagines her shouting at him, laughing at him, pranking him. He wishes for a day that she comes back, and they all swarm Ichiraku’s stall, sitting upon bar-stools, and slurping up ramen. He sometimes—guiltily—only wants her, Kakashi and Sasuke to hang out.

Sakura knows Ino better than any of them, and she talks to her about her period issues—something he  _ never  _ wants to hear again.

They love Sai, but they’ve known each other way longer than they knew him.

And sometimes—even  _ more _ guiltily—he just wants to hang out with Sakura. Alone.

Which is why he bunks his shifts to watch her lifeless body, with only a few nurses jogging around. He likes to be alone, and talk to her, though she won’t reply.

——

Ino cries occasionally, and Naruto—who was her roommate along with Sai—soothes her (since Sai is, uh, communally inept).

“I-I can’t believe it,” she says, through a sob-slurred voice. “She was—she was just—” she grasps the air with her hands, and clenches it into a fist, in search for the word she wanted. “There, at the party we through at Kiba’s place—you know, at his terrace—I’d taken some bottles from the banquet of that snotty dude who kept on snapping at Sai, because—because, you know how Sai can be sometimes—and he kept on flirting with Hinata and me. So, we—not Hinata, she’s to kind, but me Kiba and Sai—stole from him and I cooked some fries and baked some cake, brought out some Nutella to dip those plain crackers and I ordered some pizza and Sakura helped with the table—the plastic one you have, the ugly  _ orange _ one—so we had to cover it with some pretty table mat she had. There was me, Sai, Sakura, her brother, Sasuke, Kiba, Shikamaru, Chouji, Hinata—she didn’t drink, obviously, she ate some cake—and Tenten and a bunch of us. I couldn’t find you, and your phone was dead, as usual, and you never check your chats so, I was like, never mind you. So, there we were, drinking and eating, and she asked me, ‘Where’s Naruto?’ and that was the last thing she said… Sai then had asked her—”

“Wait!” Naruto exclaims, his bright cerulean eyes widening, “Rewind, rewind, rewind! what did you say?”

“‘Never mind you’?”

“No, after that!”

“She said, ‘Where’s Naruto?’”

“Yeah!” He says, his voice growing heated, eyebrows furrowing in a frustrated way. “Why did you never tell me that?”

“Why would I?” Ino says, now defensive.

“Because—that was her—she’s—her last words, right? They’re important or something!”

“Yeah…” Ino says, slowly, azure eyes curious.

“And she said, ‘Where’s Naruto?’ Doesn’t that mean that I’m—uh, that it’s important to her or something?”

Ino sighs, wiping the now dry and salty tears away from her cheeks. “God, Naruto. That was a coincidence. She didn’t know she was going to—going to fall, okay? It was a coincidence. She doesn’t like you in the way  _ you’re  _ implying.”

“But it’s not a coincidence,” he insists, mostly to himself. “Don’t they call it fate, prophy—prophecy or something?

“Yeah, sure. If it were fate, she wouldn’t have fallen that way, okay?” she gets up, running her fingers through long, blonde hair, tying them into a pony. “Some way of making your friend feel better.” She mutters, annoyed.

——

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.” Naruto growls at Sasuke, sitting down next to him and gripping a pair of chopsticks.

“Tell you what, dead last?”

“You  _ were _ there at the party, weren’t you?”

“So?”

“You didn’t tell me that her last words!”

“What about them?”

“God, bastard!” Naruto says, through a mouthful of ramen. “And they call  _ me _ stupid!”

“You are,” he intones. “And swallow before you talk.”

——

Several months pass. Naruto visits the hospital more than ever, musing over her last words.

He, one day, carries a bunch of sakura petals in a crumples Starbucks tissue paper, and places it beside her.

Post him walking away, the nurse comes for her customary inspection, to see—

To see her nose twitching, straining to smell the petals beside her.

——

It’s a week later that she opens her eyes.

Some hair has regrown, and she has curls framing her ears.

“Your hair rocks, sis,” Shizune says, watching her carefully, sadly. Sasuke simply keeps quiet, and Naruto stares.

The doctor assigned to her, Ando, asks, “If you recognise the people I’m calling out, move your eyes, okay, Sakura? If that’s okay, look to your left.”

Lifeless, dilated orbs trail slowly, inching slowly and reaching her left. She sees a blur of light, smidges of blue sky, like she’s looking through a window.

“Okay, good job! Now, do you recognise Tsunade Senju?”

She pictures her mother immediately, blonde hair and almond eyes. Sakura eases her eyes to the right. They slide slowly, as if it pains her.

Tsunade sniffs, and tears fall out of her eyes.

“Do you recognise Shizune?”

She moves her eyes to the left.

“Sasuke?”

Right.

Naruto nudges the doctor, “Ask, ‘Naruto’, you know?”

The doctor nods, and asks, “Naruto? Sakura, do you know Naruto?”

Her eyes lay motionless.

“Okay, no Naruto,” the doctor decides and scrawls a note in his file.

——

“She didn’t recognise you,” Sasuke says, tone teasing.

“She must’ve been tired,” Naruto says, agitated. “You asked her too many names.”

“She still didn’t recognise you.”

Shizune chuckles.

——

At night, Naruto goes back to Sakura in the I.C.U ward. “Do you not recognise me?” he demands. “Look to the right if you do! I’m Naruto Uzumaki, you know!”

There’s ear-numbing silence. Finally, after what seems like hours, her viridian irises move, slowly, to the right.

“So you do know me. Then why didn’t you do that when everyone was there?”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Ooh,” Naruto says, crossing his arms, and narrowing his eyes thoughtfully. “I see. You know, tomorrow also, don’t move your eyes.”

He walks away, and if Sakura could laugh, she would’ve.

——

He gets Sakura the cherry blossom flowers regularly, and it becomes part of his routine.

——

After some work at the Hotel, when he gets his hands on his phone, he sees four missed calls from Tsunade.

He rushes to the hospital, and he sees Tsunade spoon-feeding Sakura some soup.

“She had a seizure,” Shizune explains. “She’s showing movement. Now she can eat liquid foods.”

——

She’s now able to write all the letters of the alphabet except Q, B, R, and G. She can make minor grunting noises and snort when Naruto cracks a poor joke.

——

She begins to kick at night, and she can now hit the rubber balls the nurses toss at her. She gets her own dorm, moving away from the I.C.U. The dorm’s pale walls are covered in pictures of Ino, Sasuke, Shizune, Sai, Kakashi, and Naruto himself. They make it as lively as possible, and all of her friends come to through parties.

——

“These are all the flowers I could find,” Naruto tells her, as he places them in a bowl, which lay next to her. “The season is getting over.”

——

Sakura is now healthy enough to be taken home. They’ve also cut her vivid locks into a pixie frame.

——

He pushes Sakura, who sits in her new wheelchair, to her own backyard, and settles her before her favourite tree.

“You know,” he says, blue eyes fixed on the shedding petals of the sakura tree, “You asked Ino, ‘Where is Naruto?’ That night that you… fell. And that’s the last thing you said. Well, that day… I wasn’t there. I was eating Ramen. But… why did you ask?”

Sakura begins to grunt. She moves her lips, trying to formulate syllables, and her body jerks forward with the effort to convey her message.

Naruto simply nods.

——

Naruto wakes up to lunch, on a lazy Sunday. As he pours in boiling water into a small, plastic instant ramen cup, he opens his phone, and sees  _ seven  _ missed calls from Tsunade.

He runs to their house on an empty stomach.

There’s a crowd around her home, mumbling in hushed voices. He only hears, “You’ll have to sign the death certificate tomorrow,” from a nameless man’s voice, and so he barges into the house, emotions on a rampage.

The mourning family, settled around a table, confirms his deepest suspicions.

Tsunade speaks in a husky voice, slow and honey eyes devoid of her usual pride, “We named her Sakura… because she loved the flowers so much. She and Dan”—Tsunade’s voice cracked—“used to put a blanket under the tree we have. They even sometimes even sleep under the tree. Before...” she makes a vague gesture around herself,  _ all this mess _ , “she bought a mosquito net and hung it in the tree. I… I can’t… I didn’t operate on her because—” she doesn’t finish her sentence.

Shizune holds her mother’s hand, “The flowers… die very fast. They grow in February, and die in late March. I guess it’s poetic that she also…”

Naruto checks the date. It’s March 27 th . He holds his tears long enough to go home. Then he explodes. He punches the wall,  _ thud, thud, thud _ , again and again, punching and punching. His futile fists burnt with bruises, the wall’s paint chipped off, and Ino finds him there, still shoving knuckles into the wall.

——

Three years pass. Naruto has stopped bunking his shifts, since working was the only thing that kept Sakura off his mind. He scaled up his ranks. He became the manager of the housekeeping. Receptionist. And he scaled up to become the vice of the entire hotel. As he returns to his house, he sits down, lets out a long sigh, and pulls out his phone. From his notifications on-screen, he sees three missed calls from Tsunade.

He reaches their house in four minutes.

“We’re shifting,” Tsunade says. Her eyes are not lined with bags, but her eyes are not as bright as they once were. “To Kansas. I’ve retired, and I guess it’s for the best.”

Naruto nods, unblinking. Tsunade was like a mother he never had, Shizune a sister, and Sasuke… something more than a brother.

“I just…” she hesitates. “Wanted you to take the tree. I didn’t want to leave it here.”

The last Tsunade sees of him, is his back, hands clutching a cart that supports a large tree, pink petals fluttering tentatively in the wind.

——

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you liked this! i'd love to hear your thoughts :) this is pretty old but i really liked this


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